Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture
23.09.2022
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture23.09.2022
– Editors
These three sketches are from a sketchbook that Robert Maxwell used while studying at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1944. They are reproduced here to mark the publication of Robert Maxwell: the Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture, edited by Celia Scott, which is now available through Drawing… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto
09.09.2022
Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto09.09.2022
Looking at This was a long time ago/now this is lost, as well as other drawings in Rossi’s unofficial collection of l’architettura assassinata, brings to mind the image of a feast. The scenes are funereal indeed, but they hold a festive aura, as if a celebration had just taken place… Read More
Krier/Culot: Architecture, language and process (1977)
07.09.2022
Krier/Culot: Architecture, language and process (1977)07.09.2022
The essay by Robert Maxwell linked below was sent to Drawing Matter by Celia Scott earlier this year. It was first published in Architectural Design, March 1977, as part of a longer feature titled ‘The Role of Ideology’, which discussed the theme through the writing of the architect and historian… Read More
William Burges: Architectural drawing
25.08.2022
William Burges: Architectural drawing25.08.2022
– Editors
William Burges was elected to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1860 and to its council in 1862. The text reproduced below is the transcript of the paper he delivered upon joining the RIBA. Reproduced from Transactions v.9-11(1858–1861), digitised by the University of Illinois, here.
Edifice
19.08.2022
Edifice19.08.2022
These slides were sent to us by Philippa Lewis in response to Gordon Shrigley’s article on render; photographs to expand on the possibilities of the material, some results purposeful and some incidentally beautiful. Gillian Darley and Philippa Lewis started Edifice in around 1987 – a stock library source for the… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth
10.08.2022
W. R. Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth10.08.2022
This is the first text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Here we start at the beginning with Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, first published in 1891. In many respects, and certainly in relation to his later output, William Richard Lethaby’s first book,… Read More
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review
18.07.2022
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review18.07.2022
The exhibition of Freddie Phillipson’s drawings reconstructing the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses opened on Bloomsday, helping to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel. The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the European city and its architecture support a culture, and for anyone interested… Read More
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron
14.07.2022
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron14.07.2022
This text is the second in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic. The first text… Read More
Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son
04.07.2022
Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son04.07.2022
We have republished below an extract from Robert Lutyens’ short biography of his father, published in 1942, while Robert was serving in the RAF and two years before Edwin died. The book itself is uncomfortable — an odd mixture of personal portrait, family background, and an attempt to at once… Read More
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24.06.2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24.06.2022
For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook
22.06.2022
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook22.06.2022
This audio recording documents a workshop on Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira sketchbook delivered by Manuel Montenegro to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The sketchbook is a record of Siza’s thoughts and responses over three days in 1977, on… Read More
Hélène Binet: The Outsider
19.05.2022
Hélène Binet: The Outsider19.05.2022
a new way of looking at the world Working in my kitchen in the mornings of the 2020 spring.All is silent. Am I silent or is the whole world?In the darkness, you hear better, said Aristotle.In silence and in a closed environment, can you see better? Suddenly the walls of… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29.04.2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29.04.2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19.04.2022
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19.04.2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel
14.04.2022
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel14.04.2022
The plans of the Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel were drawn nearly two hundred years apart, and yet they both speak to the Ruskian timelessness of the ruin. The temple and chapel are representative of their respective ages, with the former alluding to Romanticism’s longing for a pastoral past free… Read More
Materia: Render
12.04.2022
Materia: Render12.04.2022
Render, a sticky viscous coloured slop traditionally applied by hand with a float, hawk and trowel to solid form, first as inchoate lumps, then smoothed down or mottled, to scatter particles of light in diffuse haphazard ways. Inaugurated as the application of mere ground to wall, mud render allowed a… Read More
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence
07.04.2022
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence07.04.2022
In 1991, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron prepared a submission with the artist Remy Zaugg for the Berlin Morgen (‘Berlin Tomorrow’) exhibition organised by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. By surrounding Berlin’s Tiergarten with four new buildings, they proposed to restructure the park – then perceived as… Read More
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’
24.03.2022
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’24.03.2022
The provocation for this essay is Drawing Matter’s own: ‘we take the word “drawing” to be as much a verb as a noun…’ Drawing describes an act and a thing: both a process and the outcome of that process. There aren’t many English words like it, and many of them… Read More
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City
21.03.2022
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City21.03.2022
– Paul Harrison and John Wood
We are not architects. I mean, if you insist, we could probably knock something up, but we are not that good at maths, and not really that great with materials. ‘Wood and Harrison – Architects. You’ll be knocked out by our buildings’. But we have always been interested in architecture.… Read More
Room at the Top?: Kate Macintosh, Denise Scott Brown and the Kingmaker-critic
07.03.2022
Room at the Top?: Kate Macintosh, Denise Scott Brown and the Kingmaker-critic07.03.2022
All creative disciplines rely on the mythologies of heroes: intellectual bigwigs who shape a profession’s academic and visual frameworks. A lengthy period of university study gives plenty of time for architecture students to ruminate on which white, male ‘guru’ to call their own — Corb, Aalto, Rossi, Scarpa? Drawings are… Read More
Tom de Paor: ‘i see Earth’, Building and Ground 1991–2021 – Review
04.03.2022
Tom de Paor: ‘i see Earth’, Building and Ground 1991–2021 – Review04.03.2022
On the morning of 12 April 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit, strapped into a spherical capsule fixed to the top of a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. The first to see our planet in its totality, his words were simple: ‘I see Earth. It is so beautiful.’… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia
23.02.2022
Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia23.02.2022
This is the final episode in the Pan Scroll Zoom series, edited by Fabrizio Gallanti. It was written in April 2021 and first published in print in Drawing Matter Extracts 3: Pan Scroll Zoom. Mark Dorrian is the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape… Read More
Materia 3: Red Oxide
30.09.2022
Materia 3: Red Oxide30.09.2022
– Gordon Shrigley
This text is the third in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. The first and second texts in the series, on render and corrugated iron, can be read here. Architects are subsumed within… Read More
materia (editorial series)